Ed Cooke is a dear friend and a Grandmaster of Memory. In 2010, he was interviewed by a journalist named Joshua Foer. Under Ed’s Yoda-like training, Joshua became the very next American Memory Champion in 2011. It took less than a year for Ed to transform a novice from unknown to world-class.

But how?!?

Aha… This interview explores Ed Cooke’s brilliant techniques (many of which I use), strategies, and practical philosophies. To boot, he’s also a wicked funny bastard! If you enjoyed the epic interviews with Kevin Kelly, Josh Waitzkin, or Maria Popova, you’ll love Ed. He’s one of a kind.

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Vocabulary lists in a run-of-the-mill Spanish textbook usually look something like the below, taken from real-world sources I won’t shame by naming:

La mano – the hand

El arbol – the tree

Las muñecas – the wrists

¡Nos vemos mañana! – See you tomorrow!

Mande? – Sorry? Pardon? What did you say?

Ahorita vengo! – I’ll be back in a minute!

Pretty typical, right?

Sadly, this format is also priming students for failure. Two reasons:

Spanish is listed first, so we’re training recognition. If you want to be able to speak (produce) Spanish, you should list English first, then Spanish: cue and target. For at least the first month, you will be translating from English in your head before most speaking. Have your materials mimic this process, or you’re working backwards.

Incredibly, almost no textbooks get this ordering right. If you train for recall, you get recognition automatically; if you train for recognition, recall is terrible, or as slow as molasses.

Think I’m exaggerating? How many times have you handled or seen pennies and quarters in your life? Tens of thousands of times? Millions? Try and draw both sides of either from memory. Recognition does not = recall. You have to train specifically for the latter.

A fixed list equals inflexible recall. By illustration, answer this: what number is the letter “L” in the alphabet? 5th, 14th, which? What is the third line of your national anthem? Slow, isn’t it? The answers depend on order — on the pieces before them acting as cues. If you learn words in a fixed list, the preceding words act as a recall crutch for your target word. You’ll eventually get it, but it’s plodding and haphazard. This is a major problem. This is also why, 10 years later, I can still sing (poorly) a few entire songs in Italian, but I could never recall those words independently for conversation.

We want RAM—random-access memory—where we can pull any word from memory quickly.

Mixing up flash cards accomplishes this, as does a software program like Anki or Duolingo (I advise), which does it automatically.

If you have a textbook with a fixed list, just practice doing them backwards and also in evens, odds, every-third item, etc.

¡Mucha suerte, ché!

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If you like these shorter posts (as opposed to my longer, monster posts), please let me know in the comments and I’ll do more of them!

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Jony Ive and his elite design team at Apple are coffee snobs. And rightfully so.

Coffee is the fuel that drives their brainstorming sessions, which are arguably the most important meetings in the design department. These sessions are where Apple has birthed some of the greatest products of all-time: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

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As a thank-you to all of you today, I am today releasing the audiobook of The 4-Hour Chef…for free.

This includes almost 10 hours of recording: all of the chapters on accelerated learning, all of the ridiculous experiments and related stories, and much more.

I’m partnering with BitTorrent again to bring you a bundle of goodies. The full unlocked bundle for this release is 5.4 GB of free content (!), whereas my first BitTorrent release for the print edition was 187 MB. HD instructional videos? Bonus PDFs? You got it.

The audiobook also features guest narration from one of my heroes–bestselling author Neil Gaiman!

I’ve written about Neil before (read my gushing here), and if you’re not a fan yet, you will be. Special thanks to Neil, his amazing assistant Cat, and also to Max Adams, who acted as Twitter matchmaker:

We’re letting the people decide. Today, Tim Ferriss is giving away the full audiobook of The 4-Hour Chef, complete with six hours of HD creativeLIVE tutorials that bring the 4-Hour lessons to life. Call it an experiment in anti-cannibalization. Our goal is to see how different formats can feed off of, and feed, one another.

Here’s the deal:

Check out Tim Ferriss’s page on BitTorrent. You can instantly download several chapters of The 4-Hour Chef audio, Part 1 of the full-color ebook (62 pages), and three workshop videos from creativeLIVE.

Subscribe to the book’s email list, and unlock the full audiobook narrated by Ferriss, Neil Gaiman, and Adam Verner, plus ten additional workshop videos. It’s everything you need to master everything, basically: from the kitchen to the basketball court. Except the hardcover. (You’ll need to go here for that.)

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The above video is a short presentation I gave at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam.

It covers a basic framework for mastering any skill quickly, including languages, music, dance, and more.

What skill have you put off learning for longest… and why? Let me know in the comments. Perhaps I (or other readers) can help. Second, if you could learn one skill in the next six months, what would it be?